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Milton had spent the first couple of hours wrestling with his conscience. After finally pinning it to the mat, he had devoted the rest of the day and what felt like some of the night (despite the fact that the company clocks all currently read 4:59:03:417) writing a number of morally questionable ad campaigns for imaginary products.
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Milton had tried to come up with products that could actually help the frazzled, overworked people he had met in this cheerless world. And, after all, this was only a test. It’s not like any of the ridiculous things he came up with would ever be used.
Leaving his bruised conscience behind like a crying child, Milton shuffled along the grim maze of Better & Better as exhausted employees, freed from their gated cylindricals, spilled into the aisle. In the reception area, Milton noticed an odd visor with a blinking eyeshade lying on the floor, left behind by an employee eager to return home. Milton noted that the brim was a sort of screen. Intrigued, he slipped the visor onto his head.
“Bonjour, citizen,” a brisk voice intoned as the eyeshade flickered to life. “Welcome to Ad Visor. If you know the name of the business you wish to frequent, blink once now.”
A digital grid of the streets outside the Better & Better building appeared on the brim. “To browse a selection of businesses as well as today’s hot deals, blink twice now.”
Milton blinked twice.
“You blinked once. Please state the name of the business you wish to frequent, such as Mentally Sound Pierre’s Reasonably Priced Provisions Bunker, where perfectly acceptable supplies are always yours in exchange for the currency demanded—”
Milton, his eyes looking up at the brim, accidentally knocked into a woman in an Egyptian headdress and high-waisted gray skirt.
“Pardon.”
Milton blinked twice again.
“You blinked once. Please state the name of the business you wish to frequent, such as Mentally Sound Pierre’s Reasonably Priced Provisions Bunker, where—”
Milton blinked furiously.
“You either have pink eye or are expressing confusion. Please spell out your destination, such as M-E-N-T for Mentally Sound Pierre’s—”
Milton considered where he would possibly want to go, other than his real home back in his real time. Maybe he had a relative here in Tres-peka, Kansaquois, wherever that was.
“F-A-U-S—”
“You have selected Faux-Nature, makers of fine furnishings simulating now-extinct natural environments, located conveniently near Mentally Sound Pierre’s—”
“No!” Milton shouted as he staggered down the sidewalk, earning the glares of several passersby donning gray wigs, tunics, and ornamental canes. “Is anything in this stupid era normal?”
“The Paranor Mall,” the Ad Visor replied, quickly mapping the quickest route from Better & Better to a small blip across town on the underside of Milton’s brim.
The Paranor Mall? Milton thought, stunned. Les Lobe’s museum of the supernatural is still around? It used to be in Topeka, Kansas … hey, Tres-peka, Kansaquois. I’m in what used to be Topeka, and so is Les, apparently! But how? He was already an old hippie when I was just a kid, thirty years ago.
“If the Paranor Mall is your preferred destination, blink once for yes, twice for no, and three times to learn more about today’s sponsor, Mentally Sound Pierre’s—”
Milton blinked. Finally, a friend … Les had helped Milton out when he’d first come back from the dead, showing him how to harness the etheric energy he had lost passing through the Transdimensional Power Grid back to the land of the living. Maybe he could help him through this bad dream come true …
“Hello? I mean … bonjour?” Milton asked as he poked his head into the mini-museum of madness, cluttered with fiberglass aliens, blinking flying saucers, a miniature crop circle, and a life-sized Bigfoot wearing a tiara.
Speaking of paranoid, where was the museum’s crackpot curator, Lester Lobe?
“Welcome, Seeker of the Strange, Pilgrim of the Peculiar, or anyone who got our Groupon in today’s Tres-peka Télégramme,” wheezed a familiar voice from the back of the museum.
“Les?” Milton called out as he made his way down a corridor of overflowing cardboard boxes and gaudily painted mannequins of Elvis Presley, progressing from leather-clad thin to sequined-caped portly. “Are you here?”
Milton turned the corner. There before him was what looked like a tall, hulking, swollen monster: a semitransparent creature composed of huge, muscular bubbles with something dark and shriveled at the center, as if it were digesting its latest all-too-visible meal.
“Bonjour, Monsieur-dude,” the creature said, its voice muffled. “What brings you to my far-out den of utter groovitude?”
Milton squinted at the withered shape in the monster’s chest. It was a little shrunken man wearing a fez.
“Les?” he said as he tentatively stepped toward the nine-foot-tall figure.
“Yep … in the flesh. Or in my Puff-Skin, anyway. When you’re pushing ninety years old, the old flesh suit isn’t what it used to be.”
“Puff-Skin?” Milton asked as he examined the clear inflatable suit that Les was encased in.
“A helium-filled electro-response suit. It’s what all the cool kids pushing a hundred wear. My body is, like, totally wasted. With my Puff-Skin, I can still get around … though sometimes it feels like I’m inside of a big, bouncy blowfish.”
Milton peered into the man’s wild, bloodshot eyes.
“My name is Milton Fauster. You don’t happen to … remember me, do you? I met you a long time ago … in a reality far, far away.”
Les blew the tassel from his eyes. “I can’t say I know you, though you do seem sort of familiar, in a déjà-vu-of-something-I-haven’t-experienced-yet way.”
“Look, this is going to sound crazy—” Milton said.
“Crazy is where I live, man,” Les Lobe said.
Milton chuckled, his laugh burning in the back of his throat as if the sound of mirth had never passed through Monsieur Fauster’s throat before.
“Okay, well, here’s my deal,” Milton said, the Loch Ness monster clock on the wall clicking to ten: just two hours before Milton slipped back into unconsciousness. “A few days ago I was dead. A kid, too. A dead kid in a place called Heck—”
“Heck?” Les Lobe replied with a shake, tufts of wild gray hair snaking out from beneath his fez.
“Yeah. Then I got sick—”
“I thought you said you were dead?”
“I was dead, then sick.”
“Double bummer.”
“Next thing I know, I wake up and I’m back on Earth, only it’s different, with meteors falling down. And my dad seems really weird, and I thought my mom had died after I did because she was so upset.”
“Wait … you said your name was Fauster?” Les Lobe asked, crinkling his crinkly face. “Your sister is some big fromage with the ministry?”
“Yeah, though she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with me.”
“And your biological host … or mom, Rosemary Fauster. She ain’t dead. She and a lot of other mothers are, like, fugitives.”
“Fugitives?”
“Yeah, it was a big deal. She led this revolt when the government sent its goons to take her son—you, I guess—to Tykers Island. But she and the other hundred or so bio-hosts who joined her didn’t have much of a chance.”
“Where is she?”
“Probably in Dartmoor Prison, in New Paris, where your sister and the rest of her fascist cronies do their ‘subjugating of all humanity’ shtick … no offense.”
“None taken. Why doesn’t my sister free her?”
“Your sister isn’t exactly the fuzziest bunny slipper in the closet,” Les Lobe said, scrutinizing Milton’s face. “But you’re different. I can tell. You’ve got ‘Not From Around Here’ stamped all over your forehead.”
“Tell me,” Milton said as Les knelt down, using his Puff-Skin as a chair. “How come France and Egypt are so powerful? Where I come from, they’re just countries, not empires.”
“Well, I suppose it started around the time of the Louisiana Purchase,” Les Lobe replied.
“Right,” Milton said, recalling his early American history. “Where the United States bought nearly half of America from France.”
“Maybe in your reality, but here, Napoléon backed out of the deal and took all of America by force: the whole crêpe Suzette. As for Egypt, their empire grew like the ultimate pyramid scheme after conquering Rome.”
“Conquering Rome? In my reality, Egypt was absorbed by Rome when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra.…”
“Not here, dude. On this slice of cosmic pie, Antony and Cleopatra were a dynamic, power-hungry duo that took big hungry bites out of most of Europe and the Middle East and still had room for the Sahara desert.”
The Paranor Mall shook with a violent tremor.
“What’s that?” Milton asked as a replica of an Easter Island statue wearing bunny ears toppled to the ground.
“Another earthquake,” Les said, his breath fogging up the inside of his Puff-Skin. “Those in the conspiracy community say the epicenter of these tremors is miles below the Hekla volcano in Iceland—where the Fregyptian empire has its more-covert-than-usual military base—and that the earthquakes have something to do with secret tests.… Are you okay?”
Milton’s eyes were drooping with sudden fatigue. He tried to shake the brain fog from his head. The neck and tail of the Loch Ness monster clock neared midnight.
Really? Two hours just went by? That’s impossible.
“Is that clock right?” he murmured.
Les cocked his gray eyebrow. “All the clocks are connected to the ministry’s time grid,” he replied in a “no-duh” sort of way. “So … oui.”
“With my condition or whatever, I fall dead asleep at midnight. So I better leave while I still can.…”
He gave Les Lobe a weary smile.
“It was good to talk to someone about all of this crazy stuff,” he said before staggering to the door.
“I know the feeling,” Les Lobe replied in his craggy, muffled voice. “Sometimes I feel like I should just put a ‘Gone Insane: Be Back Soon’ sign on the door … but, you know, I can’t.”
“Because you’re devoted to unraveling life’s mysteries?”
“No, because of these puffy hands,” the man replied.
“But whatever you do, Fauster, keep digging. You never know what you might find … probably a whole lot of trouble, but still. Digging your own hole is better than just standing in the one the ministry dug for you.”
Milton smiled and headed out into the pitch-black night. After a few blocks, he saw a peculiar silhouette up ahead. It looked like a pair of long shoes draped over a power line.
“Clown shoes,” Milton muttered, his mind bleary with exhaustion. A clock on the corner read one minute to midnight. Milton trotted beneath the shoes.
“Hello?” he called out into the night. “Bonjour?”
A figure materialized in the mottled shadows spilling across the curfew-barren street. It wore baggy pants, large squeaky shoes, and had a shock of hair sticking out from the sides of its head.
Milton, his consciousness sinking slowly into the swamp of sleep, staggered forward.
“My name is Milton Fauster. Are you … with HAHAHA? Part of the Pièce de Résistance?”
The honk of a bicycle horn served as Milton’s answer.
“I—” Milton started before the corner clock tolled midnight. His head suddenly felt dizzy, as if he were hanging upside down. The crown of his skull ached.
“I … am … on your side,” Milton said, fighting for each word. “I want to overthrow this grim, humorless place. But … I’m not really … myself.…”
Milton closed his eyes. He heard the grating squeal of massive machines and the mutterings of children. He pried his eyes open.
“I can be an ally,” Milton said as he fell to his knees. “Your mole in the ministry. A double agent.”
Milton’s palms slapped against the grit of the street. He forced his head up. Standing over him was what looked like a clown, complete with whiteface and red nose. The clown pointed to a flower on its lapel.
“Would you like to smell my flower, Milton?” the clown said in a distinctly feminine voice. It was all Milton could do to nod. Suddenly, water squirted out of the flower. Laughter pealed from the nearby alley.
“Funny,” Milton said as everything went dim. “Contact me in ten years. To the day. I want a meeting with … you and your group … and then … the joke will be on … the ministry.”
Milton fell to the ground, for all appearances dead to the world.